Month: October 2025

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 5

[The following is the twenty-fifth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, here is the twenty-third, and here is the twenty-fourth–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

There is one particularly wicked way to control others, and to be cruel to others at the same time. This way is through the taking away of another people’s land by use of military force, and this brings us to a discussion of the next sin.

Magic should never be used in aid of starting wars.

Now, using magic in aid of defending one’s land against invading armies, or in aid of resistance against an occupying power, is a perfectly worthy aim. We elders do not recommend, however, that we Luminosians, currently under the yoke of the Zoyans, should use magic in resistance against them. Indeed, we should not resist the Zoyans at all, for it is the Echo Effect, the law of sow and reap, that justly put us in bondage to them as punishment for our having invaded the city of Zaga and oppressed and killed their people. The Echo Effect will one day free us of the Zoyans, once our penance is complete; we must have faith in the eventual arrival of the judgement of the Echo Effect.

It is indeed providential that the name of the people who oppress us, the Zoyans, should be so similar to the name of the people we Luminosians once oppressed, the Zagans. In this similarity of names, the Echo Effect seems to be teaching us something of the law of sow and reap. What we do to others will one day come back to us, like our voices echoing back to us.

We had succeeded in using magic in aid of liberating ourselves from the Tenebrosians, as related in “Migrations,” because our bondage to those people was not a reaping of any evil we had sown. Our invasion of the city of Zaga, however, had a success that would not last because it was evil. We therefore should not use magic in aid of liberating ourselves from the Zoyans; nor should we–once we are finally liberated from the Zoyans, through the Echo Effect–ever contemplate invading, making war with, and oppressing another people, especially not with the aid of magic.

War is political murder, and murder is one of the Ten Errors as related in “Beginnings.” One must never kill or harm another, except when absolutely necessary, as in self-defence or the defence of others.

No people has the right to take land away from another people. If one people has done so, in order to mitigate the punishment of the Echo Effect, they should restore the land they stole to its original inhabitants as soon as they realize the gravity of their sin; for if they do not do so, terrible will be their loss one day!

We Luminosians, enslaved by the Zoyans, are a lesson in history, not only to the children of our posterity, but also to the peoples of all nations of the earth. If ever you invade other lands and kill their people, you will one day have your land, stolen as it is, stolen from you, and you will be killed, too! The use of magic in aid of such sins only strengthens and intensifies the sin, resulting in a harsher punishment for you!

Analysis of ‘The Party’

The Party is a 1968 comedy directed by Blake Edwards, written by him, and Tom and Frank Waldman. It stars Peter Sellers, with Claudine Longet, Gavin MacLeod, J. Edward McKinley, Fay McKenzie, James Lanphier, Steve Franken, Denny Miller, and Herb Ellis.

The film is a loosely structured farce, made up of a series of set pieces for Sellers to do improvisational comedy around. His character in the film is inspired by an Indian he played in The Millionairess (1960) and the bumbling Inspector Clouseau of the Pink Panther movies. While The Party is considered a classic comedic film, there is the problem of Sellers, a white British actor, wearing brownface and doing a caricature of an Indian stereotype…a buffoonish one, at that. I’ll address this issue more fully later.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here are links to the full movie.

It begins with an example of metacinema: we see what we originally think is the actual film, but it ends up being a film set in which Hrundi V. Bakshi (Sellers) is playing a bugler in a war between Indians and the British. The film they’re making is called Son of Gunga Din, which is an interesting title when one considers the poem, “Gunga Din,” by Rudyard Kipling.

What essentially needs to be known about Kipling’s poem, as far as its relevance to The Party is concerned, is that Gunga Din is an Indian water-carrier for the British; he is often treated abusively by the British soldiers for not bringing water to them fast enough. Nonetheless, when Gunga Din bravely tends to the wounded British soldiers on the battlefield, saves the life of the soldier narrating the poem, and is shot and killed there, the narrator regrets his abuse of Gunga Din and admits, at the end of the poem, that Gunga Din was the better man.

This far more respectful attitude of a white man for an Indian is, of course, in great contrast to Kipling’s later imperialist poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” which characterizes the colonialized natives as “Half devil and half child.” Similarly, Blake Edwards’s adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s is far less apologetic than The Party is in its racist, cartoonish depiction of a Japanese man, Mr. Yunioshi, played by Mickey Rooney in yellowface.

I suspect that the ‘son of Gunga Din’ is not only far less servile to the British, but outright revolutionary in attitude. The filmmakers have hired Bakshi straight out of India to act in their movie, and his role is prominent: I’m guessing that he is the son of Gunga Din. If so, I see an intriguing parallel of Bakshi’s spastic messing up of the movie, one already about revolutionary resistance against whitey, and his later bumbling antics at the party of Hollywood A-listers he’s been accidentally invited to. Perhaps the best way for the Third World to overthrow Western imperialism is to be clumsy and accidentally ‘crash’ the party.

The point is that this opening scene–with the Indians fighting against British imperial rule (we see what are presumably members of a Scottish regiment, in their kilts and their playing of the bagpipes)–sets the thematic tone for the rest of the film, which can be seen as allegorical of the Third World resisting the plunder of the First World by screwing everything up in it.

Since Hollywood, as a crucial part of the Western media, has always been, in one form or another, a mouthpiece of Western capitalist propaganda (however ‘left-leaning’ and liberal that may be), then Bakshi’s bungling and screwing up of everything on the set (playing the bugle non-stop, long after he’s supposed to be shot and dead; attempting to stab a Sikh guard [presumably one of several Sikh collaborators with the British] while visibly wearing an underwater watch [the film being set in the late 19th century, when such watches didn’t exist]; and accidentally blowing up a fort before it’s filmed) can be seen as representative of Third World resistance, however unconscious, against such propagandistic narratives.

The luckless filming of Son of Gunga Din is one of three focal points in The Party. The other two are Bakshi’s accidental invite to the A-lister party, leading up to all of his buffoonery and screwing things up there; and finally, the bringing of the painted-up baby elephant–a symbol of India, as Bakshi calls it–to the party, which causes the lady of the house, Alice Clutterbuck (McKenzie) to go into hysterics, and which leads to the entire house being filled with soap bubbles, since Bakshi–offended at the hippie slogans painted on the elephant–wants them all washed off.

The odd thing about The Party is how it is paradoxically both racist and anti-racist, almost at the same time. True, it is awful to see a white man in brownface affecting an Indian accent and making use of all the typical Indian stereotypes (playing the sitar during the opening credits, for example); we can leave it up to Indian viewers of the film, as well as those of Indian descent, to decide if they want to forgive Sellers et al for presenting these stereotypes and making fun of Indian culture and–from the biased Western point of view, at least–idiosyncrasies.

Not to excuse the film for these great faults, but there are other things going on in The Party that clearly criticize racism, directly or indirectly. For one thing, while Bakshi is a buffoon for about the first hour and fourteen minutes of the film, by the time he’s changed into the red outfit and he hears Michèle Monet (Longet) crying alone in a bedroom at the party, he goes in and consoles her, demonstrating what a kind man he really is. At this moment, Bakshi finally starts to be properly humanized: he’s no longer just a stock comic Indian stereotype, but a nuanced character with some complexity. He continues to be so largely through the rest of the film. Again, this change doesn’t fully redeem the film, but for what it’s worth, it’s a lot better than what was done with Yunioshi.

Bakshi’s kindness to Michèle, which includes defending her right not to have to leave the party with the lecherous movie producer, CS Divot (MacLeod), demonstrates that he has qualities that more than compensate for his clumsiness and social awkwardness. In fact, he has good qualities that render his quirks insignificant. He has the only qualities of a human being that really matter–he has a good heart. You’re a better man than we are, son of Gunga Din.

As for Bakshi’s messing up of everything at the party–which includes getting mud on his shoe, losing it in the water he tries to wash the mud off with, laughing awkwardly at conversations he’s not a part of, shooting a dart from a toy gun at the forehead of Western movie star “Wyoming Bill” Kelso (Miller), dropping bird feed (“Birdie Num-Num”) on the floor, fiddling with a panel of electronics and disrupting the party further, getting caviar on his hand, then shaking the hands of others, thus spreading the caviar odor, catapulting his roast chicken at a woman’s tiara during dinner, setting off the sprinklers in the backyard, breaking the toilet and unrolling all the toilet paper after desperately needing to pee, and falling into the swimming pool–it should be emphasized that the A-list guests deserve to have their party ruined, given their snobbery.

Among these snobbish guests are some of the richest, most powerful and influential people in the Hollywood film industry: stars and starlets, producers, and studio heads like the host of the party, General Fred R Clutterbuck (McKinley), husband of Alice, among others. Also invited are a congressman (played by Thomas W Quire) and his wife, Rosalind (played by Marge Champion). This last one is particularly icy and snobbish to Bakshi when she butts in line ahead of him to get to the washroom.

This combination of Hollywood royalty and American politicians, as well as the fact that they’re all white, reinforces how they–in sharp contrast to Bakshi–are all part of the ruling class. In this sense, the party almost sounds like the political party in power. They look like a group of people in desperate need of a bumbling fool to intrude and be a shock to the system.

Bakshi’s disruptions of the established order even seem to have a subversive effect on the staff, intentional or not. After refusing an alcoholic drink from a waiter, Levinson (Franken), Bakshi walks off while Levinson helps himself to the rejected drink. He’ll continue his drunken devotion to Bacchus throughout the rest of the movie. Later, as the party is clearly falling apart and soap suds are everywhere, the maid (played by Francis Davis) stars dancing erotically to the song “The Party.” Even the jazz musicians, at one point in the middle of the film, sneak off to a room and pass around a joint. Instead of doing their alienating work, the staff are joining in on the fun.

The point here is that there’s a connection to be made between the staff, who represent the proletariat of the First World (including blacks like the dancing maid), and Bakshi, who represents the Third World proletariat. They should all join together and overthrow the bourgeoisie, in a revolution symbolized by the mayhem Bakshi instigates at the party. I hope that in these examples I have shown that The Party has antiracist elements as well as the unfortunate racist ones.

To be sure, the antiestablishment ethos of this film, as well as so many others of the late 1960s and much of the 1970s, never meant to carry their subversiveness to a…Soviet…extreme [!]. After all, the makers of such films are, like the Hollywood snobs of the party, just bourgeois liberals themselves, not Marxists. Still, these left-leaning types were of a sort at the time when ‘left-leaning’ actually meant something, as opposed to the liberals of the 21st century, who are unapologetically embracing such reactionary right-wing politics as the “free market,” jingoist Russophobia, and Zionism. I thus feel free to interpret this liberal film in as Marxist a way as I please.

It’s fitting that, just when Bakshi is beginning to shed his stock comic Indian stereotypes and showing his compassionate, humanized side, he’s switched from that fashion faux pas of a suit into the…red…outfit [!]. Similarly, we can hear in Michèle’s otherwise saccharine song, “Nothing to Lose,” a subtle allusion to the conclusion of a classic revolutionary text. We have “so much to gain”…even the world.

Now, while some of the staff are going along with the subversion described above, others represent the typical bootlicking class collaborators, like Harry (Lanphier), the headwaiter. He is frequently angry with drunken Levinson and his resulting incompetence, resulting in turn with Harry strangling Levinson. If Levinson’s drinking on the job is his form of rebellion against his alienating work, then Harry’s comic strangling of him represents a fascist bullying of the proletariat. In the end, when Clutterbuck learns from Divot that Bakshi is the one who blew up the fort on the movie set, he–meaning to strangle Bakshi in revenge–accidentally strangles Harry instead.

Allegorically speaking, the falling apart of the party represents the self-destruction of capitalism and imperialism, partly brought about by a Third World uprising (as personified by Bakshi). Clutterbuck, who represents the ruling class, accidentally strangles Harry (the class collaborating middle class, who fancies himself higher than that, as seen in an embarrassing scene in a room in his underwear, admiring his would-be muscles before a mirror) because when capitalism finally comes crashing down, it will crush its own in the imperial core, even in its attempts to crush those in the global south (i.e., Clutterbuck’s attempt to strangle Bakshi).

As for Bakshi’s defending of Michèle from not only Divot’s sexual advances but also his bullying demands that she leave with him, his gallantry goes against the stereotype of the patriarchal Indian male. He doesn’t see women as a man’s property, unlike Divot, who at the beginning of the movie is seen snapping his fingers at a sunbathing bikini blonde, signaling her to go in a camper with him to satisfy him sexually, something she isn’t all that keen on doing.

Bakshi’s offence at the sight of the baby elephant with hippie slogans painted all over its body (“The world is flat,” “Socrates eats hemlock,” and “Run naked”) is in itself worthy of comment. Recall that he says the elephant is a symbol of India; he considers it humiliating to have the animal presented thus publicly, so he wants the kids who painted it up to wash the paint all off. The writers of the screenplay must have seen the dramatic irony of a white man in brownface saying such things. Sellers, of course, needed to wash all the brown off, too, to stop humiliating Indians.

But again, while wearing that brownface, he says a very Indian-affirming line to Divot while defending Michèle’s right to stay at the party: “In India we don’t think who we are; we know who we are.” I’m reminded of the Hindu notion of the identity of Atman with Brahman. If we know of this unity, whether we’re Indian or not, that indeed, everyone and everything are all one, we’ll be liberated from samsara. Having seen The Party, Indira Gandhi loved that line. If one watched this film with one’s head tilted a certain way, one could see the brownface and Indian stereotypes as a kind of meta-cinematic comment on racism in Hollywood movies.

Towards the end of the film, we see not only Bakshi and Michèle dancing together, but also a white man dancing with that maid. The sexiness of the latter couple’s dance moves implies a tolerance and even a celebration of interracial romances. Such an attitude is also implied when Bakshi drives Michèle home, and that they’ll surely get together again in the near future, leading to possible dates. For a film with the problematic use of brownface and Indian stereotypes, the implied romantic interest here between an Indian man and a white woman is extraordinarily antiracist given the film’s release in 1968, when there still would have been a lot more raised conservative eyebrows at the idea than there would be today.

In the end, a film about an Indian blowing up a movie prop and messing things up at a party shouldn’t be seen as a racist portrayal of a swarthy buffoon (though using an actual Indian actor to play the buffoon, in spite of Sellers’s comic talents and box-office draw, would have been much better for the film). Instead, allegorically speaking, an Indian encroaching on the world of the American ruling class and screwing everything up for them, intentionally or not, seems like karma in action. After all, how often have Western imperialists–British, American, etc.–intentionally encroached on Third World countries like India and screwed things up for them?

And ultimately, the goal of the destruction of the old order isn’t destruction for its own sake, but its replacement with a much better way of doing things. This is what we see in the growing relationship between Bakshi and Michèle. Their initial loneliness and alienation has been replaced with love and togetherness, representative of that new way of doing things–one of sexual and racial equality, and loving human companionship.

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 4

[The following is the twenty-fourth of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, here is the twenty-second, and here is the twenty-third–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

There are many ways to be cruel to others, and to use magic in aid of being cruel to others; but there is one form of cruelty that deserves special attention, and so we will focus on that here.

Magic should never be used in aid of controlling others.

We have seen in Chapter Two how magic can be, and mustn’t be, used in aid of seducing others. We gave the example from the writing called “The Migrations” how a Luminosian boy used magic to seduce a girl living next to his home, and how after using her to satisfy his lust, he beat her to death when she, realizing after his magic’s power had worn off, was horrified at what he had done to her.

We repeat the same warnings again and again because they are never heeded, and we will continue to make the same warnings until they are finally heeded! Just before the writing of this chapter, another young Luminosian, among us slaves here in Zoya, used magic to help him seduce a Zoyan woman. He was discovered with her in bed, her slave, and then taken away to be put to death. Some never learn.

Seducing others is a form of controlling others. It must be stopped among us Luminosians if we are to have any hope of liberation from our Zoyan masters. They used magic to help them control and enslave us. We must not think, as some Luminosians do, that using magic to control the Zoyans and enslave them will be our revenge on them, as that boy did.

The law of sow and reap that is the Echo Effect does not come about through man’s attempts at manipulating it. The Echo Effect works of its own accord, as a direct consequence of man’s actions. The Zoyans will one day receive the Echo Effect from their own control and enslaving of us; we Luminosians, too, will receive the Echo Effect from our own control and enslaving of others!

There are those who rule a country who may use magic to control, seduce, enslave, and lie to others in order to strengthen their power. Upon the day of our liberation from Zoya, we Luminosians must resist the temptation, when founding a new nation for ourselves, to use magic to be tyrannical rulers. If we tyrannize others with the aid of magic, the Echo Effect will ensure that we one day will be tyrannized again, as we are now under the Zoyans.

Magic must never be used in aid of telling lies to others, to create false proof of lies. Heads of state may create such false events to bolster their power, or people in communities, families, places of work, or schools may do so to harm others. Such sinning must be condemned and stopped if our people are to survive, be free again, and grow. If we allow liars to use magic to make their falsehoods seem more vivid, and their illusions seem more true, then one day, the lies will come back to us all in the most convincing of illusions. The Echo Effect will make disproving those illusions impossible!

Analysis of ‘The Game’

The Game is a 1997 thriller film directed by David Fincher. It was written by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, and it stars Michael Douglas, Sean Penn, and Deborah Kara Unger, with James Rebhorn, Peter Donat, Carroll Baker, and Armin Mueller-Stahl.

The Game was well-received by Roger Ebert, The New York Times, and others, but it didn’t do all that well at the box office, as compared to Fincher’s Se7en; since then, though, The Game has gained a cult following among Fincher’s fans, and it’s now considered among some of them to be one of his most underrated films.

Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the script.

Nicholas Van Orton (Douglas) is a wealthy San Francisco investment banker. The film begins with sad piano music as a soundtrack to old, grainy home movies of his childhood and his rich father. Naturally, little Nicholas would have identified with his successful father, so when–as we later learn–his father has committed suicide by jumping off the roof of the family mansion, with little Nicholas seeing it, the traumatic scene is not only emotionally shattering for him, it’s incomprehensible that his father would have done such a thing…in a Richard Cory sense.

His father would have been the little boy’s idealized parental imago, one pole of Nicholas’s bipolar self, to use Heinz Kohut‘s psychoanalytic terminology. Not only the death, but also the witnessed suicide, of Nicholas’s parental ideal would have almost irreparably damaged that pole, necessitating compensation from the other pole, that of the mirroring of Nicholas’s grandiose self, given in the form of his status as a wealthy man, with his power to hire and fire employees, his wearing of good-looking and expensive clothes, and many opportunities to be icy and condescending to everyone around him.

Van Orton’s defence against psychological fragmentation, which would result from damage to his remaining pole, is thus covert narcissism, which is manifested in his deep insecurity, anxiety, and depression, all hidden behind a False Self of outward confidence and control.

Other manifestations of his covert narcissism include his victim mentality, which exists in spite of his wealth and power, and which is aggravated by the Consumer Recreation Services (CRS) game played on him, which feels increasingly like persecution; the real source of his victim mentality, though, is of course his childhood trauma from having seen his father kill himself. That he’s reached his 48th birthday–his father’s age when he killed himself–and that his birthday gift from his kid brother, Conrad “Connie” Van Orton (Penn), is the paranoia-inducing CRS game, don’t make Nicholas’s associations with his father any less unsettling.

More covert narcissist traits in Nicholas include his social withdrawal, to avoid being compared unfavourably with others and thus to maintain his illusory sense of superiority, and his difficulties in relationships–he’s divorced and lonely, clearly a result of his lack of empathy for others, yet another narcissistic trait.

Now, he should be able to go through life adequately, despite his faults…except that the CRS game is going to tear his whole life apart, and smash the other pole of his already fragile self.

Now, while it is true that birth order has very little impact on one’s personality development (contrary to popular belief), Nicholas and Conrad respectively embody the stereotypes of the high-achieving, organized, mature, and responsible eldest sibling, and the fun-loving, free-spirited, immature, and risk-taking youngest sibling. These stereotypes are evident not only in Conrad’s referring to himself as “Seymour Butts” in his invitation to lunch to Nicholas, but also in Nicholas’s cool, humourless response of yes to the invitation of “Mr. Butts.”

The elder/young sibling stereotypes are also evident later on in the film, when Conrad, flipping out over how the CRS people “just fuck you and they fuck you and they fuck you,” then when Nicholas, equally upset about CRS’s manipulations of his life, nonetheless keeps his cool as best he can and tells Conrad to stop being emotional; now, Conrad complains of having never lived up to the family’s expectations.

Furthermore, at the restaurant where the brothers meet so Conrad can give Nicholas his CRS gift, Nicholas tells Conrad he’s not allowed to smoke there, but Conrad lights up in defiance, anyway. Also, when Nicholas in his uptight nature is skeptical of the CRS “game,” Conrad–insisting it will be the best experience ever for Nicholas–tells him it will make his life fun…implying that Nicholas hardly knows what having fun even is.

Nicholas goes to the CRS building, where he meets Jim Feingold (Rebhorn), who explains that the CRS experience is a game, which will fill in what’s empty in Nicholas’s life. He’s still skeptical, but he does all the psychological and physical tests necessary to tailor the game exactly to his personality. When he asks someone who’s done the game before, he’s answered with a quote from John 9:25, “Whereas once I was blind, now I see.”

In a way, The Game is a modern retelling of A Christmas Carol, with Nicholas as Scrooge, with the game’s wild disrupting of his life comparable to the terrors of the three Christmas ghosts, shocking Nicholas into his final redemption. The naming of the protagonist sounds ironic, a glum receiver of a disruptive gift with a name that’s evocative of a cheerful giver of gifts to children.

There’s yet another association of Nicholas with Scrooge that is important: both men are rich. The CRS game is expensive, so much so that at the end, Nicholas offers to help Conrad pay for it, something the younger brother deeply appreciates. That this “game” is something only rich people can afford to play is significant, for the upsetting things that happen to Nicholas are things that, if one is of the lower or middle classes, one would not be able to walk away from, whereas “a bloated millionaire fat cat” like Nicholas can walk away from them, since none of them are real–just a game. If only they could just be a game for the poor.

The game begins for Nicholas in a surprising way, since after his psychological and physical testing, he’s been contacted by CRS by phone, and they tell him his application for the game has been rejected. So when he drives home at night and sees a wooden clown lying on the ground before his mansion, put there deliberately to look like his father’s dead body after his suicide, Nicholas is soon to realize he’s been thrown into the game, willy-nilly.

With the wooden clown in his living room now, he doesn’t yet know what to make of it, so he has his TV on with the business news, as reported by Daniel Schorr (playing himself). Schorr discusses the bad economy and how “a staggering 57% of American workers believe there is a very real chance they will be unemployed in the next five to seven years.” The image on the TV twitches from time to time, causing a normal news broadcast suddenly to be Schorr directly talking to Nicholas on behalf of CRS.

Soon enough, Nicholas clues in on this oddity, and he starts paying proper attention to Schorr. That CRS, which clearly represents the omniscient, all-controlling powers-that-be, would do this to Nicholas in turn represents how a fascist, totalitarian government would surveil and thus terrorize ordinary people. Nicholas is rich, so in the end, it’s all just a game. Not so for the lower and middle classes.

Now, while smart TVs hadn’t come into their own as of the making of The Game, it’s interesting in hindsight now, as of the 2020s, to make an association of them with the film. Furthermore, one might recall the “telescreens” in Nineteen Eighty-four. And since The Game came out long after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, describing the symbolic totalitarianism of CRS in terms of communism, rather than of capitalism, would be sheer nonsense.

On top of this TVs-that-watch-us surveillance is also a commentary on the manipulative nature of the corporate media, which as of the making of The Game was already two years into the enacting of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which would result in mergers and acquisitions in American media, so that by now, 90% of it is controlled by only six corporations. These super-rich capitalists thus control most of Americans’ access to information. The totalitarianism of today is capitalist and fascist, not in any way socialist.

Nicholas learns from Schorr that the wooden clown’s head has a camera in it, and thus it is what is surveilling Nicholas. Big Bozo is watching you.

Later, Nicholas takes a plane for a business trip, but while waiting for the plane at the gate, he is informed by another man there (a CRS employee, as it eventually turns out) that the pen in his shirt pocket has exploded, staining his shirt with ink. This moment is a mild, early instance of narcissistic injury for him, the beginning of the eating away of his grandiose self, the only pole left of his bipolar self for him to hang onto.

In the nearby men’s room, he tries to remove the ink stain to the best of his ability, and a man in a toilet stall (presumably another CRS employee) asks him to give him a roll of toilet paper from a neighbouring stall. Nicholas leaves the restroom without helping the man, this being an example of Nicholas’s narcissistic lack of empathy, a Scrooge-like moment.

Nicholas meets with an employee of his, Anton Baer (Mueller-Stahl), to fire him and give him a severance package, but he cannot open his suitcase due to more CRS meddling; this is a problem whose significance will be understood later. When we see him outside, smashing his suitcase against a bench in a futile attempt to open it, his manic frustration shows that his personality is already unraveling.

I’ve used the psychoanalysis of Kohut to describe this unravelling; now I’ll use that of Jacques Lacan. The suicide of Nicholas’s father has deprived him of the man who, traditionally speaking, would have pulled him as a boy out of his narcissistic, dyadic, Oedipal relationship with his mother (the realm of the Imaginary), and brought him into the larger society of the Symbolic (hence his inability to relate with others), from the dyadic other to the Other of relating with many people. As his parental ideal, his father was also the object of inverted Oedipal feelings, so losing his father has jeopardized and compromised the stability of both the Symbolic and the Imaginary for him.

The agitations of the CRS game are therefore plunging Nicholas into the traumatic, undifferentiated Chaos of the Real, where one may experience a psychotic break from reality, the fragmentation I mentioned above. Nicholas doesn’t literally succumb to psychosis in the movie, of course, but the disruptions of the normal structure of his life, and the growing paranoia that he feels as a result of these disruptions, are certainly symbolic of such a psychotic break. Now, in Lacanian terms, foreclosure explains how the exclusion of Nicholas’s father from his family life has already set the stage for such psychosis.

Later, he goes to a restaurant where a waitress (actually another CRS employee–Unger) spills drinks all over his suit, to which he reacts with his usual lack of graciousness, in spite of her apologizing. His annoyance is a continuation of the narcissistic injury he felt when his pen exploded, and it will continue when he loses his thousand-dollar shoe from climbing a fire escape ladder as he’s been fleeing CRS agents with her.

He’s not even sure of her actual name: Christine, or Claire, as he learns by the end of the film. CRS has made his grip on reality so slippery that we can reasonably understand CRS to be a pun on curse.

Though she’s initially unfriendly to him as a result of his ungracious response to her apologies over messing up his shirt, she–an attractive young woman–later speaks and behaves in ways to suggest a sexual interest in him: displaying herself in a bright red bra to him (they both need to change clothes and shower in his shower-equipped office after a fall into a dumpster during the chase with the CRS agents), and telling him she was paid to spill drinks on “the attractive guy in the gray flannel suit”; earlier, trapped with him in an elevator, she tells him that she, in a skirt, isn’t wearing underwear when he wants to give her a boost to get out at the top. All of this sexual innuendo, of course, is part of her job as a CRS employee to keep him interested in and hooked on the game.

In the middle of this chase from the CRS agents, Nicholas has lost his impossible-to-open suitcase. What’s more, his American Express card has unaccountably been found at a hotel lobby desk. After retrieving it there, he is directed to a room he has…supposedly…booked, and there he finds his battered suitcase in a trashed room he’s apparently to spend time with a prostitute…and with lines of cocaine.

Now, the danger of a man of his socioeconomic status and reputation being exposed in a sexual scandal of this sort will cause him to feel intolerable narcissistic rage, even after he successfully removes all the evidence of his supposed naughtiness: photos of what looks like him with a prostitute indulging in various forms of kink, the lines of cocaine, video of a moaning pornographic actress, etc. A hotel maid wanting to come in the room to clean it only intensifies the urgency of burying the evidence; as he nervously tries to get rid of the cocaine, he cuts his thumb–symbolic of his narcissistic injury.

Assuming incorrectly that Anson Baer is responsible for the set-up of this potential sexual scandal (the motive supposedly being wanting revenge for Nicholas’s firing him), Nicholas goes over to the hotel he knows Baer to be in and angrily confronts him, throwing the embarrassing pile of photos on a coffee table before Baer, his wife, and their daughter. When it becomes clear that Baer had nothing to do with the photos, cocaine, etc. (he discussed the severance package with Nicholas’s lawyer, Samuel Sutherland [Donat], and he’s quite pleased with it), Nicholas leaves, apologetic and embarrassed, and he knows that the set-up was CRS’s doing.

From the photos, he’s recognized the red bra on the girl, and so assuming it was “Christine,” he knows he must find her again. Before that, though, he goes back to his mansion and finds it broken into. It’s been vandalized, and a loud recording of Jefferson Airplane‘s song “White Rabbit” is playing at top volume. This choice of song is fitting, for its lyric uses the imagery of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to describe the experience of doing drugs. The CRS disruption of Nicholas’s sense of reality is as surreal as an LSD trip (“When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead“), and like Alice, he feels as though he’s falling down a rabbit hole.

And again, where Nicholas, through his wealth and power, can find his way out of a mess like the potential sex scandal (as he’s angrily told Baer, investors won’t care about his reputation, but “whether the stock was up or down”), anyone of lower socioeconomic status would be destroyed. Similarly, Nicholas can handle a break-in far better than a poor man could. After all, for him, it’s all just a game–not so for the poor.

Nicholas meets with Conrad, who is acting (yes, acting) hysterically after apparently having been screwed over by CRS countless and seemingly unending times. The hysterical state we see him in, a display of the psychological fragmentation I described above, is a foreshadowing of what is going to happen to the more-together Nicholas. When Conrad sees a bunch of CRS keys in the glove compartment of Nicholas’s car, the younger brother acts all the more paranoid, as if Nicholas is in on the persecution of Conrad, when if anything it’s the other way around–Conrad is being like a CRS employee.

And of course, in the midst of Conrad’s emotional breakdown in front of his older brother is a revisiting of their family’s old emotional baggage as I’d mentioned above: how the younger sibling feels resentful over seeming ‘inferior’ to the far more successful eldest sibling. Such complaining is a kind of regression to a time of simpler gripes, to help Conrad forget the far more serious…or so it would seem…persecution from CRS. Conrad runs away from Nicholas in his supposedly growing paranoia, and Nicholas–with a flat tire–has to get a taxi.

He soon learns that his cabbie is another CRS employee. The driver jumps out of the cab just before having it go into San Francisco Bay. Again, because Nicholas is a rich man, this is all just a game, from which he’ll be able to escape; whereas a poor man with the bad luck of being in a cab–or any other kind of vehicle, for that matter–in which the driver is a maniac who crashes it is far less likely to get out of the predicament in one piece.

He involves the police and Sutherland, but there’s very little they can do at the moment, since the CRS building has been abandoned. Again, if one were poor, one would get virtually zero help from the police in a situation like this, since we all know who they really serve and protect; in fat cat Nicholas’s case, it will all end up just being a game.

He finally gets together with “Christine” again. At her home, he realizes she’s a CRS employee, for she tells him there’s a hidden camera in the room, with CRS doing their Orwellian spying on him. Such spying in a house anticipates the anxieties and fears many today are getting from the idea of smart home surveillance. Remember also that when I say ‘Orwellian spying,’ it’s within the context of a capitalist society, not a ‘Stalinist’ one. Nicholas will eventually get out of the game, but poorer people are far less likely to escape.

He, of course, doesn’t yet know this is all just a game (unlike the poor, who never have been nor ever will be in just a game), so he gets angry and shows that he knows he’s being surveilled. This provokes armed CRS personnel to swarm the house and fire in its windows. Nicholas and “Christine” flee.

This scene could make viewers of the film today think of what’s happened during Trump’s second term, with such incidents as the immigration raid on Chicago apartments. Or one might be reminded of the 1985 MOVE bombing. Rich Nicholas will learn it’s all just a game soon enough. The real-life victims I’ve just described will never find themselves in a mere game, though.

As Nicholas is fleeing with “Christine,” he comes to understand that CRS has apparently drained his bank accounts by guessing his passwords using the psychological tests he did, though Sutherland reassures him that none of his money has been touched. She says he’s in on the scam. How many poor-to-middle-class people have been conned out of their money, with no comfort of learning in the end that it was all just a game?

Finally, in another house, she gives him a drink, but it is drugged. As he’s getting dizzy and losing consciousness, she admits she’s part of the ‘scam,’ and that CRS is finished taking all of his possessions, since he’s given his card security code over the phone. At the risk of sounding redundant, I must say again: such a scam played on people of modest means would not end up to be a mere game.

He wakes up in a Mexican cemetery, buried there in a filthy white suit. Symbolically, it’s like a death, a harrowing of hell, and a resurrection; but instead of him experiencing a kind of ‘apotheosis’ or ‘deification’ in a ‘spiritual body,’ if you will, he’s been reduced to nothing. Not only is he materially annihilated, but he’s also been humiliated–it’s a Lear-like drop from the royalty of wealth to destitution. This is the greatest narcissistic injury he’s endured yet.

The only thing he has left of any value is a watch, a sentimental gift from his mother that he’ll have to hawk to get some money for a bus ride back to the US. He’ll also have to beg a ride back to San Francisco from a driver in a diner; none of the people asked wants to give a ride to such a filthy-looking ‘bum.’ Nicholas now knows what it’s like to be poor and despised for it.

This is the point where both poles of his bipolar self have been compromised: his birthday has made him the same age when his father, his idealized parental imago, killed himself and thus became an eliminated pole (all the more eliminated with the losing of his mother’s watch); and his grandiose self has been smashed from this financial ruin and abasement of his social status. This means that the other pole has been all but eliminated. He gets back to his (foreclosed!) mansion, takes a cold shower, puts on some respectable-looking clothes, and gets a pistol. Naturally, he wants revenge on CRS. When a carjacker tries to take his car, he points the gun at the guy and tells him he’s “extremely fragile right now”: with his bipolar self so compromised, he certainly is fragile.

He also learns of how fragile Conrad apparently is from the manager of a hotel Conrad was staying in: he’s had a nervous breakdown, it seems, and been taken to a mental institution. The younger brother’s apparent psychological instability is a double of Nicholas’s actual growing instability.

One redemptive moment for him is when he gets together with his ex-wife, Elizabeth (played by Anna Katarina), and he asks her forgiveness for his having been an emotionally neglectful husband. He’s gone through the extreme of hell and come out finding heaven, in this sense: recall the previous player of the game and his quote of John 9:25. I’ve discussed the dialectical relationship of such opposites as heaven and hell in other posts.

While with Elizabeth in a restaurant, Nicholas sees Jim Feingold on TV in a commercial–he’s an actor. He remembers the Chinese restaurant Feingold had gotten food from when they’d met before he did his tests. Nicholas manages to trace Feingold to a local zoo, where he is with his kids. Unbeknownst to Nicholas, this is all CRS just bringing him back into the game.

He forces Feingold at gunpoint to take him to the real CRS office, where he sees all the employees who were involved in his game…including, of course, “Christine.” Nicholas speaks of pulling back the curtain, so he can see, so to speak, the Wizard of Oz.

Such a rising up against the conspiratorial powers-that-be is a fantasy many have had, in their wish to believe that the world is run by some secret, Satanic cabal (run by ‘the globalists,’ ‘the NWO,’ ‘the Freemasons,’ ‘the Jews,’ etc.), since so many like to see the world as a kind of cosmic melodrama than as the banality that it really is. Seeing the world in such a melodramatic manner seems easier, since one can avoid seeing it simply as run by capitalists and see doing something about it as an impossibility; otherwise, one might have to take responsibility and plan a revolution.

Anyway, Nicholas has “Christine” on the roof of the CRS building; she speaks frantically of his gun not being a prop and that the whole thing has really just been a game, which of course he doesn’t believe. Doors open to the roof, and he assumes it’s CRS guards, so he fires…but the bullet goes in Conrad, who’s holding a bottle of champagne while the others with him are there to wish Nicholas a happy birthday.

Devastated, Nicholas has truly reached the lowest point, a low that makes the Mexican cemetery seem mild in comparison. Both poles of his bipolar self have been utterly shattered: he walks off the roof in imitation of his father’s suicide. He lands, however, on a giant air cushion in a banquet hall, where he is to celebrate his birthday.

The CRS employees predicted that he’d be pushed to a suicide like his father’s. Feingold later tells him that if he hadn’t jumped, Feingold would have had to push him off the roof. This all gives us a sense of how disturbingly omniscient CRS seems to be. As representative of a surveilling, totalitarian government, Godlike CRS comes across, in spite of having just played a game, as being just a little too powerful for our comfort.

In this would-be suicide leading to his entry to his birthday party, Nicholas’s ‘death and resurrection’ has truly seen him go through hell and into heaven in the dialectical sense I described above about the Mexican cemetery. Now his character arc is complete, like Scrooge after experiencing the horrors of future Christmases. He is transformed into a good man, willing to give and receive love.

But as I’ve related so many times, he as a wealthy man can afford (literally) to be put through all of this hell and come back okay. Some people might be put off by this ‘happy ending,’ but the point is that the wealthy can experience this kind of thing as a fun adventure, whereas if any of these things happened to the poor, they would never experience it as a game…except in the sense that it is a ‘game’ that the ruling class–the real CRS curse of the world–plays on the common people all the time. The poor would hit a hard ground in such situations; they wouldn’t hit an air cushion.

The Tanah–The Laws, Book 2, Chapter 3

[The following is the twenty-third of many posts–here is the first, here is the second, here is the third, here is the fourth, here is the fifth, here is the sixth, here is the seventh, here is the eighth, here is the ninth, here is the tenth, here is the eleventh, here is the twelfth, here is the thirteenth, here is the fourteenth, here is the fifteenth, here is the sixteenth, here is the seventeenth, here is the eighteenth, here is the nineteenth, here is the twentieth, here is the twenty-first, and here is the twenty-second–about a fictitious discovery of ancient manuscripts of a religious text of narratives and magic spells. Its purpose for my readers and me is to provide a cosmology and mythography on which I am basing much, if not most, of my fiction–short stories and novels. If anyone is interested in reading this fiction, he or she can use these blog posts as references to explain the nature of the magic and universe in my fiction.]

There is the sinful use of magic in aid of indecent pleasure, and there is also the sinful use of magic in aid of inflicting undeserved pain on others. This leads us to a discussion of the second sin on the list from the first chapter.

Magic should never be used in aid of cruelty to others.

Such cruelty is not to be limited to cruelty to one’s fellow man, but also cruelty to animals, the needless destruction of plant life, or that of any form of life in our world. Killing of any kind must have justification and be necessary.

Cruelty exists in many forms, and magic can and has been used in aid of these forms. They include beatings, intimidation of the weaker and smaller, torture, murder, sexual violation for the purpose of causing another pain, the spread of lies and slanders, and many others.

The Luminosians, on the taking of Zaga and in their rule of it, were guilty of all of these cruelties, as well as the use of magic in their aid.

When Zagans tried to resist the Luminosian theft of their land, we used magic to aid us in beating them. The magic spells we used gave us greater force in our fists and the clubs we used to hit them with.

Against Zagan resistance, we also used magic in aid of intimidation. Our magic spells made us appear larger, fiercer, and more frightening to the Zagans, making them recoil and retreat.

We Luminosians would capture Zagan resistors and subject them to torture. We would use magic spells to sharpen and intensify the pain we inflicted on them, to deter the rest of them from resisting us.

Other Zagans, who tried more aggressive forms of resistance, what we called ‘terror,’ were murdered by us. We Luminosians used magic spells to murder many more Zagans than ordinary weapons could, and our spells made the deaths far more painful and slow than ordinary weapons could. This sin of ours was the true terror.

While in the previous chapter, we discussed uses of magic in the aid of using women, girls, and even animals for the sake of filthy, lewd pleasures for oneself, there is also the use of magic for such filthy and lewd use of these objects of supposed love that is meant to inflict pain. This sin was often committed by Luminosians against Zagan women and girls, as part of our intimidation and subjugation of all Zagans.

We also used magic spells to help spread lies and slanders against Zagans, calling them ‘uncivilized,’ ‘barbarian,’ ‘animals,’ and the like, in order to justify our cruelty to them. The magic spells were used on our own people, so Luminosians would never doubt the lies about the Zagans. Only a few of us had the wisdom not to allow ourselves to fall under the spells of the wicked among us.

In time, all these evils came back to us in kind! The Zoyans use their own magic to aid them in beating, intimidating, torturing, murdering, raping, and slandering us. The Echo Effect returned our sins to us. Those sins will also be returned to the Zoyans one day, freeing us finally. When that day comes, we must remember never to use magic for evil again!

Analysis of ‘First Blood’

First Blood is a 1972 novel by David Morrell. It was adapted into a 1982 movie by Ted Kotcheff, the screenplay written by Michael Kozoll, William Sackheim, and Sylvester Stallone, the last of these three of course starring as Rambo. Brian Dennehy and Richard Crenna costarred.

The film went through development hell for ten years because of such difficulties as finding the right director and cast, and getting a suitable screenplay. Morrell had sold the film rights in 1972 to Columbia Pictures; the rights were then sold to Warner Bros., and finally Orion Pictures produced the film. Another reason a film adaptation didn’t appear in the early to mid-1970s was that the Vietnam War was still going on, and film studios were worried about moviegoers’ reactions to such sensitive subject matter as that of a Vietnam vet waging a one-man war against an American town.

A suitable adaptation was finally created, to a large extent from Stallone’s rewrites, when the novel’s violence was toned down, Rambo was made more sympathetic, and he would survive in the end, which–thanks to the box-office success of the film–allowed for sequels to be made.

In fact, Morrell wrote the novelizations for Rambo: First Blood Part II and Rambo III, having informed readers in the preface to Part II to disregard the death of Rambo in his original novel. Then came two other films, Rambo and Rambo: Last Blood; all of the sequels’ screenplays were co-written by Stallone, with Morrell having no involvement in any way with the writing of the last two…though he praised Stallone’s portrayal of Rambo in the fourth film, saying Stallone had returned the character to Morrell’s original intentions as angry, cold, burned out, and filled with self-disgust.

Here is a link to quotes from the first film, and here is a link to an audiobook of the novel.

While the two sequels from the 1980s, as I said above, novelized by Morrell (fittingly, as you’ll see why below), were little more than mindless action movie nonsense, and one can basically say the same about the other two sequels, in a sense it is fitting to see Rambo in actual war situations (in Vietnam in Part II, in Afghanistan in Rambo III, in Burma in Rambo, and in Mexico in Last Blood). I say this because I see the original novel and first movie as telling a story that, while set in an American town, is an allegory of the Vietnam War, with Rambo personifying US imperialism, and the local cops representing the Vietnamese army.

Accordingly and predictably, as far as the sequels are concerned, the Vietnamese and Soviets are portrayed negatively (except for pro-US Vietnamese spy Co Bao (played by Julia Nickson) in Part II, the Soviets are portrayed negatively in Rambo III, the Burmese government is portrayed so negatively (which should not be misconstrued that I’m advocating for the junta) in Rambo as to have had the film banned in the country, and in Last Blood, Mexicans are portrayed so badly that there have been accusations of this last sequel promoting racist and xenophobic attitudes towards the country (in a rather Trump-esque vein). This sort of propagandizing against and vilifying of any country or government going against US interests is typical of imperialism.

As for the first movie, the local police of the town of Hope, Washington (in the novel, the town is Madison, Kentucky) are also portrayed negatively, with sheriff Will Teasle (Dennehy) being prickly to Rambo right from the start. Deputy Sergeant Arthur “Art” Galt (played by Jack Starrett) is abusive to Rambo to the point of psychopathy; and the other police, when chasing Rambo in the forest and getting wounded by him, cry out to Will for help like children weeping for their daddy.

In contrast, the novel’s portrayal of Teasle is much more sympathetic and nuanced, with lots of backstory to tell us the kind of world the sheriff is from. His wife has left him, so he has to deal with the pain of that. Also, Teasle is a Korean War veteran, so in that, among other things, he parallels Rambo the Vietnam vet.

Also, in the novel, Teasle doesn’t arrest Rambo (who is called only “Rambo” or “the kid”; the “John” and “James” are inventions of the movies) until after he returns to the town several times. This is opposed to Dennehy’s Teasle, who is abrasive with Rambo just upon first seeing him and not liking how he looks. He arrests him immediately for vagrancy upon Rambo’s just beginning his first return to the town.

It’s important to contrast the tone of the film with that of the novel in light of my allegorizing them as representative of American involvement in Vietnam. The film is, as I’ve said, far more sympathetic to Rambo, and far less sympathetic to the local police and reserve army “weekend warriors,” while in the novel, there’s much more moral ambiguity between the two sides.

In the film, Rambo injures those coming after him, but he never kills them, except for Galt, and even he is killed only accidentally, in self-defence. In the novel, Rambo kills many cops, and most deliberately, including Galt, who isn’t the ACAB pig of the film, but rather a somewhat inept cop who often forgets to lock the door leading upstairs from where they keep the incarcerated downstairs.

This contrast can help us understand the film’s attitude, as opposed to that of the novel, concerning the Vietnam War allegory that I see in both. The film, in having us sympathize with PTSD-stricken Rambo, as against the obnoxious local cops, takes the pro-American attitude towards Vietnam. The novel, with its morally ambiguous attitude towards both sides, allegorically takes into account how wrong it was that the US went into Vietnam and did all the damage it did there.

When we see Teasle telling Rambo, with that American flag on his jacket, to get out of town and stay out, we can see Teasle’s intolerance towards Rambo as representative of the Vietnamese not wanting any more imperialists or colonialists in their country. After all, they had just finished driving out the French colonialists by the mid-1950s, and because of Western Cold War paranoia about the ‘Red menace,’ then, by the 1960s, they had to put up with Uncle Sam moving into their country.

So the cops’ arresting Rambo, then chasing him into the mountainside forest, are allegorical of US troops taken as POWs by the Vietnamese, who then would have chased any escaped POWs in the jungles of Vietnam. Certainly in Rambo’s PTSD-addled mind, his reliving of the trauma he suffered in Nam as he flees to the forest from the cops makes the whole story into the Vietnam War all over again, from his perspective.

Seen in this light, the notion of who really “drew first blood” has a chillingly ironic new meaning.

It’s assumed by most in the West that Vietnam started the war because the “commies” were out to take over the world and ‘enslave’ everybody, so the US had to stop the spread of communism (i.e., the ‘domino theory‘) and intervene. Actually, the US lied, through the bogus Gulf of Tonkin incident, to justify greater involvement in Vietnam. US imperialism and colonialism (i.e., the French) drew first blood, not Vietnam. Allegorically speaking, Rambo’s insistence on coming into town again and again (as in the novel)–defying Teasle’s insistence that he not do so (however more patient he is with Rambo in the novel, even allowing him to have something to eat in a local diner)–is what has metaphorically drawn first blood, too.

In the film, why should Teasle think that Rambo’s entering town with the American flag on his jacket, of all things, to be a sign that he’s looking for trouble? And looking the way he does, in combination with the flag (long hair, sloppy, and smelling bad), is what’s implied, of course, but allegorically speaking, it can represent a white man in Southeast Asia in a green army jacket, with that flag on it, implying a military uniform.

To make Rambo more sympathetic in the film, we see good-looking Stallone with combed hair and no beard or mustache…unlike the far shaggier and scruffier-looking Rambo of the novel. Also in the film, he is further humanized in its opening scene, in which he tries to visit a veteran friend from his team in Nam by going to the vet’s home, only to learn that he died of cancer from Agent Orange. Rambo is lonely, homeless, and suffering from PTSD. The Rambo of the novel has the same problems, but because of his tendency to kill, he’s far less sympathetic.

The issue of veterans’ PTSD, emphasized in the film, is of course a valid one, especially given how shabbily the US government has treated its veterans when they’re no longer of any use to the imperial war machine. Empire doesn’t just harm those outside the imperial core: it hurts those within it, too, and that’s why it’s valid to allegorize a vet’s war in an American town as a war in one of those Third World countries that the empire wants to subjugate and plunder.

These soldiers traumatize others and get traumatized themselves. Rambo’s loneliness represents the alienation and estrangement people feel in society and workers feel doing their work. Accordingly, while Col. Samuel Trautman (Crenna) in the film knows Rambo well (calling him “Johnny”), has personally trained him, and–as the final scene makes clear–is a father figure to him (once again reinforcing our sympathy for the US Army’s point of view), in the novel, Capt. Trautman merely headed the training facility where Rambo learned to be a soldier, he hardly knows Rambo at all, and he’s the one to put a bullet in Rambo’s head at the end of the novel.

My allegorizing of the story as one of Rambo fighting in the Vietnam War, instead of the local American cops, can be seen clearly in the novel, when shortly before Rambo’s breaking out of the police station and racing off to the forest on the mountain, he remembers a time in Nam when labouring as a POW, he gets sick, and he is given a chance to escape when the Vietnamese guards leave him to his own devices. Going through the jungle, he’s given food by local villagers, and he eventually rejoins members of the US Army.

Paralleling this Vietnam memory is Rambo’s escape from the police station, where instead of being sick, his vulnerability is from running outside completely naked (he’s just had a shower to clean away his body odour, and before he even has a chance to get dressed, he’s freaking out from a PTSD trigger from the cops’ attempt to shave his beard and give him a haircut). In the forest on the mountainside, Rambo gets clothes, food, and a rifle from an old man and a boy illegally making moonshine from a still; this help parallels the Vietnamese villagers having fed him.

Rambo is extremely averse to getting a haircut and a shave. In the novel, he’s kept in a cell that gives him claustrophobia. In the film, the sight of the straight razor gives him a PTSD flashback, making him relive the terror of a Vietnamese guard bringing a blade up to his chest and slashing it, triggering Rambo’s fight/flight response. Cutting his hair and shaving his beard, as the cops try to do in the novel, can be compared to the cutting of Samson‘s long hair, thus depriving him of his great strength. In the end, Samson kills all the Philistines, but also himself; in the novel, Rambo kills many of his enemies, and himself gets killed, too.

Having Rambo escape naked reinforces our sense of how tough he is. He can ignore public embarrassment, the discomfort of his unprotected nut-sack slapping against the seat of the motorbike as he races into the wind on it, and the possibility of scraping his skin on the ground if the bike crashes. Him naked among the trees on the mountainside also reinforces our sense of how feral he is.

Another point of contrast between the novel and the film is in who they emphasize as being the main victims of the Vietnam War. In my allegorical interpretation of the novel, Rambo’s shooting and killing of all of Teasle’s cops, as well as that of Orval Kellerman (played by John McLiam in the film) and his dogs, and on top of them, his setting of much of the town on fire suggests the American troops’ shooting and napalming of the Vietnamese and their villages. The film’s emphasis on Rambo’s PTSD, leading to him breaking down and crying at the end, as well as his never deliberately killing anyone, emphasizes how victimized the American vets felt.

Now, Rambo’s rant to Trautman at the end of the film, about how wrongly he and other vets were treated by antiwar protestors, them spitting on him and calling him “‘Baby-killer,’ and all kinds of vile crap,” is valid insofar as some troops really were innocent of such atrocities. Other troops, however, weren’t so innocent, as was the case with the My Lai massacre of 1968.

In any case, the antiwar protestors should have reserved most of their ire for the top military brass and American government. Recall that old antiwar song by Black Sabbath, which condemned the generals and politicians that plotted and started the Vietnam War, then had the poor–young men like Rambo–do all of their dirty work for them…and it was those very same poor who came home–if they weren’t killed–traumatized, unemployed, and often homeless, like Rambo; it wasn’t the generals or politicians who suffered thus.

I mentioned above how there are parallels between Rambo and Teasle in the novel, i.e., they’re both vets. Also, it’s not just Teasle et al hunting Rambo; it’s vice versa, too. Both men sustain nasty injuries in the mountainside woods, and it’s as if there’s a psychic link between the two, because later on in the novel, when Teasle is back in town, he’s had a vision in a dream that Rambo is coming back into Madison.

This time, Rambo’s going back into town to torch it all, linking this return to the other ones at the beginning, which prodded Teasle into arresting him and starting the whole conflict in the first place. This linking of going back into town, in terms of my allegory, shows how Rambo’s arrival has always been an invasion, even if he didn’t kill anybody at first. It’s like the imperialist establishment of South Vietnam (or South Korea, for that matter), a preparation for coming war and prompting the establishment of the Viet Cong.

The whole point in allegorizing the conflict in First Blood, with a US vet fighting a local American town to represent the US army fighting in Nam, is to show how imperialism’s ravaging of other countries eventually turns back on itself, causing the empire to eat itself up and ravage the imperial core. This is what we can see the Trump administration doing as I’ve been writing this post: first, they did the usual–continue to enable the Gaza genocide and Ukrainian war, and threaten Venezuela; now, they’re sending the National Guard into American cities like Washington DC, Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles to terrorize American citizens, regardless of whether or not they’re illegal immigrants, in response to an “enemy within.” When we hurt people outside, we hurt people inside (e.g., Vietnam vets’ PTSD), because in the end we’re all one.

Before Rambo goes back into town, though, he still has to hide from those doing the manhunt for him, which by now has included the National Guard and civilians. He goes deep into a mining cave, in which at first he imagines it’s like being in a Catholic Church where he can go to confession; indeed, he contemplates how he wasn’t justified in killing those cops–he could have simply escaped, but he knows that his instinct to keep fighting is powered, at least in part, by his enjoyment of killing. In his bloodlust, we can see how he personifies US imperialism.

Deep in that black pit of a cave–which in the novel, at one point shorty after he’s come back out, is aptly compared to hell–Rambo comes to a filthy chamber with toxic fumes and a floor covered in shit. Bats fly out all over him, biting and scratching him (in the film, it’s rats). He is repelled back, but he soon realizes that it’s only through this awful chamber that he’ll be able to come back out to the surface. Only by going through the darkest hell can one come back out to the light: this heaven/hell dialectic, like any dialectical unity of opposites, is something I’ve discussed in a number of blog posts before.

So in this situation, Rambo is like Jesus harrowing hell before His resurrection…though Rambo’s return to the earth’s surface will make him anything but holy.

Nonetheless, the notion of Rambo emerging from the cave as a kind of resurrected, avenging Christ is apt when we consider, in the context of my allegory, how the missionary spread of Christianity (in places like Africa, for example) has been used to justify colonialism and imperialism. Recall Ann Coulter‘s incendiary words about Muslim-majority countries immediately after 9/11: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” The Western capitalist complaint about “Godless communists” would have also been used as a rationalization for fighting the Cold War in general and the Vietnam War in particular.

In any case, when Rambo comes out of that cave, he feels “good,” as it says in the novel, being the only apt word to describe how he feels. He’s full of resolve and energy, eager to fight his personal war on the town. This good feeling is comparable to experiencing the transformed, ‘spiritual body‘ of the resurrected Christ, ready to go out and fight as a Christian soldier against the ‘civilian’ pagans, or those whom Rambo fights, those without his military training and discipline.

In the film, he steals a military transport truck carrying an M60 machine gun. In the novel, he steals a police car and some dynamite. With these weapons, he’ll cause a mayhem to the town comparable to the napalm mayhem the US Army caused in Vietnam. He’ll blow up two gas stations, the police headquarters, and much of the town.

But of course, he can fight this personal war only for so long before he’ll be stopped. His inevitable, ultimate defeat is allegorical of the quagmire that the Vietnam War turned into, an unwinnable one that was beginning to be seen as such by the aftermath of the Tet Offensive in 1968, the year Morrell began writing his novel.

Trautman tries in the film’s and novel’s varying ways to convince Rambo to stop fighting and thus to save his life. Allegorically, this is like the US Army’s big brass realizing that they had to pull out of Vietnam before more of their men needlessly got killed.

In the novel, Teasle and Rambo shoot each other, and Teasle–in that connection I said he has with Rambo–feels a need to be near Rambo when he’s finally killed. The police chief, a former vet, and this Vietnam vet parallel each other in their shared forms of pain (sustained injuries in the mountainside forest, alienation and loneliness [recall Teasle’s wife having left him], etc.).

The ultimate connection, though, between Teasle and Rambo is, in terms of my allegory, a dialectical one, in the sense of Hegel‘s master/slave dialectic. One can be recognized as self-conscious only through the other recognizing him as such. Rambo and Teasle react to each other at the beginning of the story. They have a fight to the death; one becomes lord, and the other, bondsman (in my allegory, these would respectively be Rambo-as-US-imperialist and Teasle-as-Vietnamese-resistor). The contradiction between the two is resolved through the efforts of the local police to stop Rambo in the end, making him realize he cannot go any further. This resolution is allegorical of Vietnam fighting so hard for many years until finally liberating themselves from Uncle Sam.

On the surface, it might seem that it’s Teasle who is the lord, and Rambo the bondsman, since it’s through Rambo’s hard fighting that he ends up outdoing the cops for so long, and escaping them; but even if we take this interpretation, it just shows how dialectically interchangeable Rambo and Teasle are, each other’s yin and yang.

Finally, what is ironic about a franchise with a seemingly indestructible tough guy is how, in this first film, the one unequivocally good one, in its climactic and emotional final scene, Rambo cries like a baby, just like Teasle’s wounded cops in the forest. Trautman comforts Rambo like a father figure (as opposed to the novel, in which Orval–the old man with the hunting dogs–is Teasle’s father figure, yet another parallel between Rambo and Teasle). The big action hero is thus a rough, tough cream puff, a Herculean masculine ideal as impossible for men to live up to as is the Marian/Aphrodite ideal for women to attain.

A scene was filmed of Crenna’s Trautman being made by Stallone’s Rambo to shoot and kill him, a forced suicide; for obvious reasons, it was disliked and excluded from the film. As I said above, in the novel, Trautman blows Rambo’s head off; earlier in the novel, wounded Rambo intended to kill himself with some of that dynamite he had.

In any case, Rambo dying at the end may not be pleasing to moviegoers who’ve invested so much time sympathizing with him, but it is the fitting end to the story, because the whole point of First Blood is how Rambo’s projection of who ‘started the fight’ is ironically how he started it (if only allegorically so, according to my interpretation); also, the whole point of the story is how it ends, with Rambo-as-US-imperialism killing many others, then self-destructing.

As of the writing and publishing of this analysis, Americans have been witnessing that self-destruction of empire on their very soil. They ought to reflect on that, and not wish for any sequels to the fighting.